You Can Say You Knew Me When (26 page)

III.

     A night and a day and another night has been lost to liquor in the blood my blood included this time. They poured this poison upon me and now I am angry with the memory of being such a laughing then cursing drunkard. Cursing Chick and Mary for seeing me as the housejester to be goofy for them and take their insults and cursing Don for his control over me like a warlock. And then comes morning with its splitting headaches with neither me or Don able to lift heads from pillows. Which is when I made my attempt to tell Don the new plan to bum down to Mexico and be pure of heart in the outdoors only to have him insist he must come too or else I shouldnt go because even the hobos travel in twos and then his talk of the brotherly love between us such as saying only he understands me though nobody has understood me not ever not now. I will not speak of what followed except to say that his physical persuasion was a kind of animal sorcery and I fear there exists a realm of my subconscious that does what it wants with me even as my conscious mind repels and is repulsed. This will pass. One more reason I must not return to Frisco with him.

     A hot day even the clouds are no relief as I sweated climbing high into the blue dome. Walking past large black canine bowel movements and Lo there across the grassy slope is one Mr. Coyote. I didnt know what to do should I run like a deer or set a trap like a mountainman? Instead I did what I failed to do with Don which is look into its eyes with the truth. When I stared into the eyes of Mr. Coyote he spoke to me a warning because he saw something in me to which he did not approve. I stood frozen and deeply thinking upon that warning and the mistakes I have mistakenly made and how to set Teddy Garner right again.

IV.

     I think I should make it with Mary although I suspect that those parts of her are empty and dry. She is a smart broad a oncepretty lady who becomes ugly when sad. Mary in her oldlady dresses and complaints of bellyaches Mary of the Bottle Mary with her Used-to-Be History. Last night Don and Chick left us alone and I joked I would seduce Mary while I had my chance. Mary said “Your probably a virgin” and I said in fact I was the lover of a married woman so watch out! Mary smiled for me I am a clown in her eyes. Teddy Garner Dumb Schlumb Clown.

     Mary wrote poems years ago in North Beach. Now she lives here with Chick weary with life and she doesnt write poems. She walks around holding her belly with some unknown pain. She doesnt have art she doesnt have North Beach and she hardly even has Chick who prepares himself for a higher incarnation and ignores his wife. I spied him in a meditation position behind the cabin looking like a piece of cheese grilling on a rock in the sun.

     Don walks past me now at the Royal and his hand rests on my head heavy as in the night. I know now I am right to hatch my new plan. I must escape. Either that or suffocate in this cabin where there is too much booze and sorcery.

V.

     I awakened early to shut my dreams up and smelled the cabinair thick with coffee and bacon and standing over the misty stove was the lady of the house in a bath of sunlight and steam. Out the clear window was more visible ocean than in the past five days of this foggy purgatory. “Mary we must walk together through this sunshine” I exclaimed but she whimpered of a bumleg to match her other illfeelings. I swear it is no easy job to break through the depressive neurosis of the aging Beat.

     I told her we would only climb high enough to get a widerview and if your too tired to walk back down or if your trick leg starts walking away on its own I’ll carry you triumphantly back. I was of course using one of my joker-voices and so made her smile and at last her Resistance was worn down by my Persistence. Teddy Garner you don’t need to be a poet you need to be a salesman selling ideas to an unknowing public. If you were a square you would make a great ad man.

     Then up and up we went with Mary holding my hand for steadiness until the day became like a great Arthurian play with Our Hero and His Queen isolated on mountaintop.

     And so Our Hero slipped his hands inside of His Queen’s royal robe and shuffled down bloomers to the familiar weeps and sighs he has come to know from the female of the species. Our Hero layed her down first checking for rocks or coyote bowel movements or any other pea that would disturb this princess. And what followed was a lustful act that grew into great noises of man and woman loud enough to rattle birds from trees but hopefully not alert the Queen’s husband down in the valley below. For surely if he is in earshot the shrunken husband will recognize the completion of Queen Mary’s conquest.

     Down drops the curtain as Hero and Queen begin the descent, not so friendly now that they’re spent.

VI.

     I must catch up on my adventurous sudden turn of events. Three nights have passed since I sat at this Royal. That was when in a foulmouthed exit from the cabin I raised a fist at Don and Chick and Mary and shouted that they were doomed and everything was
shit
and “I shall
not
return!” Marching away I swung a heavy rucksack over one shoulder and hoofed it from their Transylvanian shack where Don with his warlock charm and Mary with her accusations and Chick the Most Furious Budhist in the Western World watched with dumbfounded faces. (But your Hero is a Fool, as has well been documented in these pages—I add this now back at the Royal where I look upon the handscrawled notes I kept and now type into the chronicle so that I may report that these three days have taught me all I need to know about being a man and facing down nature and death with hunting and gathering and solitude.)

     In the woods I was quickly lost on my journey to Mexico. Water was rushing atop the soil somewhere whistling like my Irish mothers fervent prayers and I directed myself to this creekflow. I traveled hours downstream to a fragrant flowery place and was as an old lady at the New York Botanical Gardens stooping to smell flora along the way. I decided this place would be a welcome womb for the night. Or perhaps it is the pungent trap of a hidden she lion. One must always be prepared for traps from She. Eventually darkness came and cold air and with it my first solo night in the woods or ever.

VII.

     I awoke next to a creek on damp silty shore with biting-bugs upon me. Light shone only in top branches of trees but it looked heavenly which may be a good omen. Then I searched upstream to see where I had last fumbled in the dark and was stopped cold by the sight of pawprints in the mud. Paws without claws which means cat and the prints big as DiMaggios mitt.

     The hills go on for miles green on green on green all the way from here to the ocean. At first I just looked and saw hills and trees. Now different versions of tree are defined as I study roots and trunks and the spinal chaos that is the branches. I see how trees grow twisted with age and influence. And how birds fly in twos. I could hear the flutter of their very wings against the air. They call to each other speaking their private language amid all the other languages. Do birds speak to each other across species? Is the maker of that warble over there understood by the producer of that foul cry over thataway?

     All my thoughts were loud like conversation in my ear. I heard the voice of my father talk to me a thick brogue announcing that summer camp will be an experience to put hair on my chest. But years later here was the prophecy come to pass not summer camp but the real thing.

     I became determined to make a mark to Plant a Flag. And so when I got to the hilltop where the pine trees replaced the twisty ones below and where the water spills forth like the very eternal juices of Mother Earth herself I did the thing which is known to men as taking care of the Need. That was my way to claim this hilltop for all the bums like me past and present with my own seed mixed into nature as who knows how many have done before.

VIII.

     They call her Mother Earth but I think she is a cruel Father who punishes us as we conquer him. That hilltop was no more mine than the air I breathed or this water that ran down the creek through my clumsy fingers in my vain attempt to grab a fish. It was a time of going a little cuckoo from being alone. Visions of Mexico meant to soothe me through this loneliness turn into just more foolhardy thoughts.

     Darkness was coming again and I wondered if I might find others in the woods for directions or to share some precious food and water. Was it only two nights ago Mary fed me pie baked from her own profane hands? My belly questions if it ever knew food. In a desperate act I ripped a piece of leather from the inside of my rotten broken muddy shoe and sucked on it so as to cheat the sense of eating.

IX.

     A victory! I killed a perching bird with a stick. Snuck up like the Irish Warrior King that runs in my veins and brained the piteous creature. But as I stared at the cold body deadeye wetblood feathers never to fly again I shivered for the murder. I cooked the bird over a fire only useful enough for cooking not heat. Happily I had matches and in a rare instance of not being a dumb schlumb with no sense I kept them dry those two and a half days. My head was heavy with confusion and my stomach gurgling as it transformed the dead thing into achy gas.

     I pushed on and found shelter in a railroad car abandoned here from a rancher who has let his herd roam on this hillside. I am so relieved for the shelter that I see it must have been left here for me for the drifters before me and the mad ones to follow the long linking of wandering warriors.

X.

     I have had thoughts and questions of death such as how long a man lasts like this stupidly lost and without food and unfit for killing. I wondered what was happening back there in the regular world. What was falling apart and coming undone and dying. I thought especially of Danny and how once he would have been my bosom buddy adventurer partner but he has been silent for months and maybe dead too for all I know.

     But in my lowest low I spotted a tree on a far hill that looked like one I remembered from being with Mary on the mountain. So thats where I decided to head. I found a dirtroad and after some traveling I met a stoic suspicious rancher who refused me a ride but directed my unshaven madman self toward the road which it turned out was not so far from the cabin though it seemed a hundred miles had passed.

     Thus I went back to from where I fled.

XI.

     The prodigal son returned repentant stumbling up cabin stairs falling to the cabinfloor in a state of exhaustion and stomach pain. Don carried me and ministered to me and fed healing soup and now delays his return to the city so as to watch me in my sickbed. I do not understand all that stirs in him but truly he is a true friend.

     I made a general apology to every one of them but Mary will not forgive me either for my angry walking away or for coming back I do not know and Chick with liquor on breath stares like an enemy. Don whispers to me her claims that I took advantage of her though she was a seducer as much as me. This seems like a lifetime ago. Today for my sanity I am back at the Royal clacketyclacking.

     I took a walk out into the drygrass this morning and smoked a cigarette daydreaming of brushfires started by flyaway embers. Hearing in the wind the sound of traveling flames. A vision of this poisoned paradise burned away.

XII.

     Now I am back in San Francisco and still nursing gutpain and everywhere I look I find a city steamy with usedup legend. Rising from the pavement are the rank vapors of artistic excrement all those poets and painters stumbling around unwashed. I am queasy from breathing in the rotting of yesterdays genius. The same rot Mary carries with her the reason she must clutch at her aching insides the reason she lives with an unsmiling drunken monk.

     Yesterday I turned a corner into an alley where among cement walls stands a bearded fellow teetering on his denim legs. He upchucks on cue as I watch wrapped in attention. Two weeks ago I might have called this downtrodden fellow a beat king imagining myself with him five years earlier arms over shoulders we stumble forth from the Six Gallery stoned on booze and the glory of poets remaking the world wetbrushstrokes on canvas newjazz cracking open the veil of the commonplace. But now I see he is just a guy retching gruesome in an alley in North Beach not a poet not a hero not a saint. Not a warrior of the mountains who has had to kill to eat to survive the dark.

     I no longer want the world to split open. The sun on this alley blanches out all my past visions and I find myself made angry at Frisco which is a City of Lies and I am no more understood here than I was in Hell’s Kitchen.

     Thus I did something to prove myself more than just a dumb schlumb and the courtjester to the oldtime sadsacks. I strided up to that beat bum and I pointed to where he had spewed forth his boozey innards and I shouted at him “Look at that mess you made you good for nothing oaf.” I shook him until with fear in his bleary eyes he begged “Leave me alone!” Then I let him go because I thought, my feelings exactly.